How Clearly Increases Customer Loyalty Using Social Media

Discover how the largest online supplier of eyewear uses social media to connect with influencers and support customers around the world.

Founded in 2000, Clearly is the largest online supplier of contact lenses, glasses, and sunglasses. Clearly expanded beyond the world of ecommerce in 2013, opening its first retail location in Vancouver, where the company was founded.

Known first as Clearly Contacts, the company underwent a rebrand in May 2015, adopting the tagline “See Life Shine” to better communicate the role Clearly plays in helping people enjoy life through better vision.

Active on 13 social profiles

Global presence across 5 different regions

2 million combined social followers

As the social media specialist at Clearly, Maria Japson is responsible for the organic social media strategy and community management for Clearly’s 13 social profiles across five regions, including Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand.

Social media allows us to bring our brand to life in a more relatable way. People can see our glasses being worn by people just like them, which makes the experience a lot more personable.

Maria JapsonSocial Media SpecialistClearly

What they did

Ambassador and influencer relationships developed on social

Trying to picture a pair of glasses on your own face can be hard, especially when shopping online. Like any other accessory or piece of clothing, seeing the glasses worn by someone else can be the most helpful factor in deciding to make a purchase.

Knowing this, Clearly recruits its most fashion-forward customers who take their eyewear collections as seriously as their shoes. They share their stories as “style ambassadors” through profiles on Clearly’s blog, theLook, and on social media using the hashtag #lookambassador.

Building these relationships on social media helps Clearly tap into new audiences. Through the social networks and connections of their previous style ambassadors, who had been predominantly female, Clearly found male influencers to showcase as style ambassadors for a recent campaign revolving around the Joseph Marc Craftsman series.

By profiling these new style ambassadors—which included an entrepreneurial barber and an acclaimed chef—Clearly was able to broaden its social reach and build its brand with more of their target demographic.

Open and transparent social customer service

“Social is where so many of our customers go to speak with us about their orders,” says Japson. “Our customers use social to make their voices heard, and we want them to know that they’re being heard.”

Social media helps us prove to our customers—or anyone curious about our company—that we actually care and that we’ll do what we can to make them happy.

Maria JapsonSocial Media SpecialistClearly

Along with manning the call center, Clearly’s customer service team is trained to monitor social media using Hootsuite and quickly respond to any negative posts. Since social networks are such public forums, addressing negative feedback with honesty and transparency is crucial to the success of Clearly’s social customer service strategy.

“You have to be genuine,” shares Japson. “Your tone of voice and response to customers can really influence the people you’re speaking to—and the people who are watching.”

How they did it

Involving social in the overall marketing strategy

Social media isn’t simply a means to an end for Clearly. Japson works alongside the blog and brand teams to weave social media into campaign strategies from the beginning.

By doing this, Clearly taps into the unique opportunities that social media networks offer. Instead of using social as a one-way communication channel, Clearly uses it to connect with influencers, find new ambassadors, and turn customers into brand advocates online through relationship building.

“With a larger campaign, the benefits to including a hashtag or sharing element for your fans to use allows you to gauge how engaging the campaign is, and how relatable they find it,” says Japson. “On top of that, it will amplify your campaign to extend past your current audience while also giving you a good picture of those within your audience the campaign speaks to most.”

Monitoring conversations across different regions in real time

Clearly uses Hootsuite to monitor online conversations from both current and potential new customers alike. In order to effectively maintain multiple social profiles for different regions, Japson uses Hootsuite’s scheduling feature to ensure that all of Clearly’s customers feel close to the brand no matter where they are.

“Being able to schedule posts for multiple regions helps us stay relevant and relatable to all of our customers, even as they experience different seasons from one another,” Japson tells us.

The results

As a team of one, Japson uses Hootsuite to stay on top of the social conversations happening across every region, ensuring Clearly doesn’t miss a single opportunity to inform, inspire, or support a customer.

Using social media to create a community of ambassadors has helped contribute to the success of Clearly’s most popular brand on social, the exclusive Derek Cardigan line. With the majority of their style ambassadors choosing to wear the brand and posting about it on their social networks, the hashtag #DerekCardigan has been used over 10,000 times on Instagram and continues to grow.

By using Hootsuite streams to organize the social conversations taking place about Clearly, Japson can keep tabs on all of them in one place. This social listening strategy helps Clearly gain a deeper understanding of what’s working across each region, identify any customer service issues, and find opportunities to connect with potential new customers.

Hootsuite is our go-to tool for monitoring conversations on social media. If our team had to manually track every post across every social network, they would lose their minds.